Garry Kasparov (Persuasion, 7/23/20) warns that “the drawing of false moral equivalencies has started to dominate the mainstream”—hampering the hunt for the sins of the wicked by obsessing on the sins of the ideologically righteous.
Persuasion describes itself as an outlet for “advocates of free speech and free institutions,” and is described by Slate (7/10/20) as “a newly launched ‘intellectual community,’ whose announced list of members overlaps heavily” with the signers of the Harper’s open letter “on Justice and Open Debate”—”particularly, the core group that the New York Times credited with having written the Harper’s letter.”
As an example of the sort of debate Persuasion promotes, it recently published a defense of the United States by one of its advisory board members, chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov (another Harper’s letter signer), under the headline “America’s Mission” (7/23/20). The piece began with a list of “maxims” by which “ideologues whose agenda is power, not justice,” have “hijacked” the “fight against oppression”—ideas, then, that Kasparov thinks you should reject.
After opening with “Compromise is weakness,” Kasparov offered a series of these maxims that pretty much say the same thing:
- Flawed good is the same as evil.
- The exceptions are more important than the rule.
- Telling the whole story is so important that it is worth falsifying the plot.
If these maxims are wrong, then the correct approach must be: Don’t waste time criticizing bad things done by good people; focus on bad things done by bad people instead.
What’s striking to me is that this is precisely the point of Kasparov’s fifth and final maxim—which, again, is what he says people “whose agenda is power, not justice,” believe:
- The sins of the ideologically righteous matter not so long as we hunt for the sins of the wicked.
Not only is that opposite to the message of the three previous maxims, it’s an accurate if somewhat snarky summary of Kasparov’s whole piece: that while the United States has made “serious mistakes…along the road to deeper and broader liberalism,” that should not be allowed to distract us from the fight against “the evil forces that have always opposed those gains, and now seek to roll them back.” I can only figure that this kind of attitude only marks you as someone “whose agenda is power, not justice,” if you have the wrong sort of ideology—not one that is truly righteous, like Garry Kasparov’s.
Featured image: Garry Kasparov at the 2017 Goldwater Dinner (cc photo: Gage Skidmore).
I can’t believe ppl are still stuck on a “right” vs. “wrong” ideology debate… We’re already in the 21st century, right? Or are we not there yet?
Thanks for writing about that, Jim.
Greetings from the global south (Brazil)
I’m going to stick with YODA: ” Do or do not, there is no try.”
I was a Neocon at the start of the 2003 invasion of Iraq but when I found out that the entire premise of the invasion of the war was wrong I asked myself what I considered a logical question. Were we a good country that made an honest mistake or were we an accident waiting to happen?
I have come to the conclusion that we were an accident waiting to happen. That we are systematically inclined to harm other countries. The thing I found most remarkable is the complete unwillingness to accept this even as a possibility. To be blunt, I cannot stand my fellow Christians. We have an entire religion that announces human nature to be flawed but the most rabid believers in America’s innate and incorruptible goodness are those who should be appalled by such a declaration.
I guess that when you become completely intoxicated on power, you become blind to things which should be obvious. There is nothing I can do about it but watch the carnage.
Just to be clear: I agree with the author and Kasparov is an evil supremacist.
Kasparov was/is a brilliant chess player. However, beyond that, what little I know about his politics doesn’t strike me as anything much more than simplistic strident conservatism that I can easily find in most newspapers, AM talk radio, or a Chamber of Commerce screed.
From the Harper’s article:
“The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted,” the letter declared, citing “an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.”
“We refuse any false choice between justice and freedom, which cannot exist without each other,” it continues. “As writers we need a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk taking, and even mistakes.”
As a not-ready-for-prime-time writer, but one who writes guest opinions and letters to the editors, I absolutely agree with the above sentiments. I find the most intolerant, the most biased, the most who refuse to look in the mirror, come from the left. NPR and PBS epitomize this pathological intolerance of differing views.
Don’t confuse NPR and PBS with “the left”.
Was extremely disappointed to see Chomsky on the list otherwise composed utterly of sophists and intellectual hunchbacks. Age has addled his wits, evidently.
Trying to find any sort of coherent thought from Garry Kasparov is a tough endeavour.
People think chess players are smart.
Once you’ve played chess among chess players, you know it’s not true
I think that it is good that FAIR has kept open the comments section. I just started reading “How Fascism Works”, by Jason Stanley, while finishing the old book by Karl Popper, “The Open Society & Its Enemies.” Sometimes in comments you see the irrationality of our time, and then you can also see attempts by people to know something together. Popper writes about how science is based on a ‘methodological nominalism’, and social sciences are mired in a search for a thing’s essence, or ‘methodological essentialism.’
Reminds me of karma: “Bad things happen to people who do bad things.” So says Karmanomics.net (https://karmanomics.weebly.com/about). It also has a few choice things to say about one Donald J. Trump. :-)
Doncha love the way people rationalize their own behavior or point of view. It’s like saying the definition of an alcoholic is “anybody who drinks more than I do.”
This is an important article, but I think it would benefit from being a bit longer, with some specific examples of ‘good people doing bad things’, and of how so-called ‘bad people’ are being mis-categorized in the media. As it stands, the article is at an abstract level that is unlikely to be understood by those who might benefit from understanding it.
“If these maxims are wrong, then the correct approach must be: Don’t waste time criticizing bad things done by good people; focus on bad things done by bad people instead.”
I’m struggling to imagine what is going on in your head to interpret Kasparov’s remarks that way. My best hypothesis is that you divide the world into “good” and “bad” people, and assume everyone else does, too.
Here is what Kasparov’s “bad maxims” mean:
Compromise is weakness: The belief that trying to meet the people who disagree with you halfway is unacceptable. This belief leads to trying to “win” at democracy, which democracy is /specifically designed to prevent anyone from doing/. This belief is behind the Democratic party’s desire to settle everything at the federal level rather than at the state level, in the hope that they can just win the Presidency and both houses for one term, and then utterly destroy their opponents.
Flawed good is the same as evil: This belief expresses the Western / Christian / Marxist tradition, which descends from Plato, which demands perfection and purity, and believes that finding failures in a system proves it is imperfect and hence should be destroyed and rebuilt from scratch. This is the doctrine behind BLM.
The exceptions are more important than the rule: This is very similar to the previous point.
Telling the whole story is so important that it is worth falsifying the plot: This maxim claims that it’s okay to lie if it supports your narrative. For instance, as you did in your article on guns and deaths, in which you used statistics on gun suicide to claim that gun ownership increases gun homicide. We’ve been looking at these same stats for about 70 years now. Whether you look at them nation-wide, by state, across time, or in other countries, there is no clear correlation between gun ownership and crime unless you count suicide as a crime. My own town has about the highest gun ownership in the US, and about the lowest gun crime.
My big question is why you think that you’re criticizing Kasparov by saying he means “Don’t waste time criticizing bad things done by good people; focus on bad things done by bad people instead”, when that’s what you and FAIR try to do. But then again, you also seem to be under the impression that FAIR is “challenging media bias”. Good grief. FAIR does literally nothing but perpetuate and defend media bias.